TMCnews Featured Article

Dell’ (News - Alert)Oro Group, a market research firm, has announced that Carrier IP market revenues are expected to grow in 2014 after five straight years of decline.

Much of that growth will come from IP Multimedia Subsystem (News - Alert) (IMS) Core, Session Border Controller (SBC) and Voice Application Server (VAS) systems. Sales of these systems grew by 41 percent.

"We see significant expansion of Voice over LTE (News - Alert) (VoLTE) services in North America in 2014, after the initial 2013 launches in Korea and Japan.  The implementation of these services has already driven hundreds of millions of dollars of capital spending," said Chris DePuy, Vice President of Carrier IP Telephony research at Dell'Oro Group.  "We expect other regions, including Western Europe and China to be drivers to similar capital spending in the next year."

The overall Carrier IP market was over $1.8 billion in the fourth quarter of 2013, including VoIP and VoLTE.

On the other hand, the Carrier IP telephony declined by four percent as opposed to a year ago. The softswitch and media gateway markets have already matured and are thus declining.

As more people opt for smartphones and other devices, this will drive demand for more advanced services from carriers. They’ve been struggling to keep up with the sheer amount of data that smartphones push across their networks, so there’s a big incentive to upgrade if they want to keep their customers.

There’s also a lot of competition from Over The Top (OTT) services like Skype (News - Alert) and other mobile VoIP apps. Even if many carriers would prefer that their customers use their own services, either way, they’ll need to provide the bandwidth to handle these advanced services, no matter who they belong to.

More advanced networks could in turn drive adoption of more advanced devices and applications.